Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Of Ventspils

Your correspondents went to Ventspils for the annual Ventspils City Festival. (Once again, this was a couple weeks ago - we reject the blog medium's obsession with timeliness and immediacy.) Not unlike many cities around the world, Ventspils started a public art project based on variations of an animal sculpture - in Ventspils' case, they chose the humble cow. Now there are several well-known and permanent cow-themed sculptures in town, including this blue sailor cow on a breakwater near the port. Latvia does actually claim to have honest-to-goodness blue cows. And they are vaguely, sorta blueish. They only rarely wear orange stocking caps, though.

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Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.